FCO HISTORIANS

OCCASIONAL PAPERS

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No. 11

1945-1995: Fifty Years of European Peace

Foreign and Commonwealth Office October 1995

FOREWORD

In March 1994, Sir Alan Campbell, a former British ambassador to Italy, delivered a lecture at the FCO on the career of Sir Eyre Crowe. The

success of that occasion prompted the FCO to contemplate organising another lecture this year. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of VE- Day, we invited the distinguished military historian, Sir Michael Howard, to address an invited audience on 4 May 1995. Sir Michael chose '1945-1995: Fifty Years of European Peace' as the title of his lecture, and his words were delivered to the evocative sound of wartime aircraft flying over the Office in preparation for the VE-Day commemorative events.

Sir Michael's masterly analysis of one of the most significant periods in our history was a fitting introduction to a memorable week. I myself am delighted to have an opportunity of reading his lecture again and hope that it will reach as wide an audience as possible through its publication as the latest in the FCO's series of Occasional Papers.

Sir John Coles October 1995

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

HISTORIANS

Occasional Papers

No. 11 October 1995

THE 1995 FCO ANNUAL LECTURE

1945-1995: FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN PEACE

by

Sir Michael Howard

Copies of this pamphlet will be deposited with the National Libraries

FCO Historians, Library & Records Department,

Clive House, Petty France, London SW 1H 9HD

Crown Copyright

ISBN 0 903359 61 8

1945-1995: FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN PEACE

A Lecture delivered at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office

4 May 1995

It seems fitting that in this building, and especially in this room 1 we should today be celebrating not the end of a war, but the beginning of a peace; the longest period of unbroken peace that Europe has ever known, and one that looks set to continue for many years yet. It would seem equally appropriate that, while we are celebrating the skill of the generals, the courage of the armies, the resolution of the peoples and the wisdom of the political leadership that gave us the victory, we should not forget the diplomats whose professional expertise ensured that that victory should establish the foundation for two generations of peace, rather than, like that of 1918, laying a powder trail for yet a third destructive war. After all we venerate the wisdom of Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand, the architects of a European concert that played in harmony of a kind for forty years. We applaud the skill and restraint through which Bismarck gave Europe a further generation of peace after the Wars of German Unification. Diplomatic historians (now about the only people who remember it) admire the solidity of the structure erected by the Congress of Berlin in 1878 that kept the peace in Eastern Europe for a further thirty years; while the architects of the Versailles and associated treaties of 1919 are quite reasonably reviled for the mess that they made of the peace settlement after the First World War. Should we not therefore give credit where credit is due - to the statesmen and their professional advisers who crafted the peace settlement of 1945, which has lasted until the present day?

The trouble is that there was no peace settlement in 1945, or even in 1946. Arguably no peace settlement was made until November 1990, forty- five years later, when, during that brief window of opportunity between the reunification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the representatives of the former belligerent powers again assembled in Paris to confirm a settlement of the frontier-disputes in Eastern and Central Europe which had been the immediate cause of the Second World War. The tidy- minded historian - and almost all historians are tidy-minded - can be grateful that the turbulent chapter in European history was thus concluded before another, far more complex, opened before him. In the perspective of that chapter the year 1945 seems only a suspension of activity, a chord

I The Grand Reception Room of the Locarno Suite where the Treaties of Locarno were signed on 1 December 1925. These Treaties, initialled at Locarno in Switzerland during the previous October, sought to end the strife and tension in Europe which had continued after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

awaiting resolution for a further half century. It did not bring a settlement; but it did, mercifully, bring peace that made a settlement ultimately possible. The diplomats of the time should therefore be given the credit, if

not for building a new peace, then at least for averting another war.

It is this unique situation that makes any attempt to compare the events of 1945 with those of 1918, or 1814, or indeed any previous war-termination in modern history, rather a waste of time. I can think of no previous major European conflict that was not concluded by a formal peace settlement within a year or so of termination of hostilities; settlements regarded as convenient milestones in the unfolding history of the continent. Certainly in 1945 the diplomats saw it as their job to fashion such another peace settlement, and studied previous examples to see how, or how not, to do it. 1919, of course, was seen as an example to avoid. This time an unreconciled enemy must not be left with the capacity to recover. Germany should be, if not split up again as many of her enemies desired, then at least thoroughly debellated. Further, whatever the differences, the victorious allies had to remain united. And the leaders of the United States realised that their country could not afford once again to turn its back on the outside world, but had to create a mechanism for the preservation of world order in which America would this time play a leading role.

For the British at least, 1814 seemed a desirable model. The arguments of its later detractors, that the architects of the Vienna settlement had

unwisely attempted to repress the growing forces of nationalism rather than accommodate them, seemed rather less convincing once people had

experienced the conflicts which those forces had unleashed. What did seem admirable about the settlement was the clear-sightedness with which its

makers had recognised the danger which the dynamic power of revolutionary France had posed to the peace of Europe and redrawn the map to ensure that this should not happen again, without attempting the impossible task of eliminating France as a major power. If this model were followed the United States must play the part that Britain had in 1814, of the off -shore power whose wealth had made victory possible and whose support would be needed to ensure the stability of the settlement. The Russian role was unchanged: once again, Russia was the nation principally responsible for the defeat of the aggressor's armies, but one whose power and possible ambitions still needed to be guarded against in the creation of any new balance. Britain would play the role of Austria, with Anthony Eden as her Metternich. The only trouble was the defeated adversary. There were no tame Bourbons in Germany to restore, and no Talleyrand to negotiate on their behalf. Germany had ceased to exist, and there were fundamental disagreements among the victorious allies as to the form in

which she should be recreated.

In fact the conditions for a stable settlement based on a new balance of power were in many ways more favourable in 1945 than they had been in

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1918. Then inevitable conflicts of interest had been compounded and made irreconcilable by the pressures of angry and irreconcilable public opinion. The French would be satisfied with nothing less than a Carthaginian peace, but one which they did not have the power to enforce without the support of Britain and the United States. In the United States, Congress rejected all the responsibilities that President Wilson had assumed on behalf of the American people and showed themselves concerned only to recover their war debts. In Britain a fickle public opinion veered rapidly from blind hostility to all things German to a sentimental desire for reconciliation, combined with a total indifference to an Eastern Europe where the newly- created nation-states were a natural prey to a revived Germany and Russia

unless they received explicit support from the West. As for Germany, an angry and irreconcilable section of public opinion refused to accept that they had been defeated at all, and never forgave the messengers who told them that they had. With the partial exception of England, the statesmen of 1814 had been able to pursue balance-of-power politics without too much concern for domestic opinion; when the Germans showed signs of making trouble, Metternich slapped down on them the Carlsbad Decrees. 2 But it is hard to know what Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand could have done in 1919, at the head of ships that would not answer the helm and whose crews were on the verge of mutiny.

In 1945 public opinion was far more biddable. The Germans were in no position to object to any settlement imposed on them. Soviet public opinion is a matter of guess-work, but it is unlikely that there was much objection to the Carthaginian peace that Stalin showed himself anxious to impose on the people who had caused so much suffering to the Soviet Union. The Americans, although they wanted to get their boys back home as fast as possible, accepted their inevitable involvement in and responsibility for a settlement in Europe, while in Britain political leaders were given a very free hand by an electorate primarily concerned with domestic affairs, and whose main interest in foreign policy was that the German menace should be scotched for good and all. So the difficulties that confronted the diplomats in 1945 were not, as in 1918, largely home-grown, and their failures were not the result of their own ineptitude. They arose from the intractability of the situation with which they were confronted.

The main problem of course - give or take a generation of revisionism and counter-revisionism - was the intractability of the Soviet Union. There had never been any illusion that Stalin would be an easy partner: the `Uncle Joe' image current in public opinion, and encouraged for wartime purposes, had not percolated into Whitehall, whose officials observed with some concern how Stalin seemed to be charming Winston Churchill as effectively as Hitler had charmed Neville Chamberlain. Stalin had always been quite

2 In October 1819 these Decrees proclaimed a policy of collective repression within the countries forming the German Confederation.

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frank about his war aims. In November 1941, with the Germans literally at the gates of Moscow, he had made it clear to Anthony Eden that a victorious Soviet Union would be content with nothing less than the East- European frontiers of the former Tsarist Empire. Three years later in October 1944 he had negotiated with Churchill a very specific agreement as to how far Soviet influence should extend westward beyond their frontiers. The Yalta Conference the following spring did little more than recognise a fail accompli, accomplished by the Soviet armed forces that already stood along Germany's frontiers, and by the prior agreement reached by the European Advisory Commission on occupation zones within Germany itself. A well-merited sense of deep obligation to the Poles made Churchill do his best to elicit promises of fair treatment for them from Stalin, but they were promises that the West could do nothing to enforce. The British government realised very clearly that they could influence

events in Eastern Europe, in so far as they could influence them at all, only through maintaining good relations with Moscow, and this was one reason among others why such good relations had if possible to be preserved.

If there was an illusion about Stalin in diplomatic quarters in 1945, it was that he could be dealt with on a simple basis of Realpolitik, on the assumption that he would define and defend his own interests but in his turn respect those of the other actors on the international scene; that he was a statesman in the mould of Metternich rather than of Lenin - certainly not of Trotsky. Up to a point this was true. His invitation to the British to establish bases on the mainland of Western Europe, even if not seriously meant, indicated an awareness of the value in retaining British co-operation in the containment of German power. But if his tactics and strategy were those of a Realpolitiker, his ultimate objectives were those of all Marxist- Leninists - the destruction of the capitalist world-order and the triumph of the workers of the world under the leadership of the Soviet Union. For him and his associates, the Soviet Union had been in a state of war with the West ever since its inception. Fascism was for him only a particularly menacing form of capitalism, and he had found it necessary to ally with the class enemy in order to destroy it. Its destruction none the less left the main body of enemy forces intact: sooner or later he believed that they would resume their hostile activities against the Soviet Union if only to stave off the inevitability of their own collapse. Britain and the United States had been temporary if necessary allies - and highly unsatisfactory allies at that - but they were permanent enemies. With the end of the war, and the final elimination of Germany, there as no reason why they should not now be treated as such.

It is possible that the Foreign Office - not an environment in which ideology is encouraged to flourish - did not take these long-term objectives seriously enough whereas in the United States they were perhaps taken too seriously. But the Realpolitiker in Stalin did make it possible to do a limited amount of business with him. His short-term objective in 1945 was almost

6

certainly compatible with that of the West -a period of stability, to enable the Soviet Union to recover from her enormous losses. The instructions received by the Communist parties in Western Europe, somewhat to their consternation, were to co-operate with the bourgeois parties and not cause undue trouble, while in Eastern Europe at least a simulacrum of a multi- party system was allowed to camouflage the reality of tight and brutal communist party control. With half of Germany occupied by Soviet troops, the rest of Western Europe economically shattered and the United States

once more abandoning, to all appearances, its involvement in Europe, there was no longer any immediate threat from the West. Perhaps a truce might have been preserved, at least for a few years longer, even if it did not lead to permanent detente, had it not been for the second intractable factor;

the problem of Germany.

As we have seen, the fundamental difference between 1814 and 1945 - indeed, between the end of every major war in the history of Europe and 1945 - is that there was no enemy left to negotiate with. There was no Talleyrand to play so skilfully upon the rivalries of his former enemies that a chastened Germany could be peacefully re-incorporated into the European political system, and even if there had been such an aspiring figure there was no Germany left for him to represent. This is not the place to discuss whether the allies were indeed wise to prosecute the war to the point of unconditional surrender, and to refuse their support to those resistance leaders who offered themselves as an alternative regime. For the moment, I would say only that I find entirely legitimate the scepticism general in the Foreign Office at the time, as to how far those leaders, however heroic, did offer a serious alternative to the Nazi regime; how far that alternative - overwhelmingly right-wing in its personnel - would have been acceptable to the Soviet Union; and what conditions they would have demanded - not least in respect of Germany's eastern frontiers. Their supporters often visualise - as many of them did themselves - that they would have concluded a peace with the western allies alone, to enable them to fight more stubbornly on the Eastern Front; but anyone who seriously believes in such a possibility has no conception of what public opinion in this country, to say nothing of that in occupied Europe, would have been prepared to tolerate in 1944-45. Rightly or wrongly, such a renversement des alliances in 1945 was politically inconceivable. It was to take five years, and a very different Germany, before it was possible even to contemplate it.

So the war ended without even a puppet German government to do the conquerors' bidding and the conquerors had to do the job themselves. Even if Stalin had been far more willing to co-operate than he actually was, it is hard to see how the problem of Germany could have been solved by any means other than virtual partition. In the first place, Stalin was implacable in his determination to extract every scrap of economic retribution that he

could from his defeated enemy; not only to replenish his own exhausted

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economy, but permanently to weaken an adversary whose capacity for rapid economic recovery was a matter of very recent record. The West however - or at any rate the British - had learned rather a different lesson from the experience of the 1920s, that the prosperity of Western Europe was indivisible, and their own economy could not flourish if their neighbour was bankrupt. If the shattered West-European economies were ever to recover, the economy of Germany had to recover with them -a lesson not lost on General Marshall when he travelled through the devastated continent in the spring of 1947 and saw with his own eyes the need for a massive transfusion of American resources if society in Western Europe was to avoid total collapse. Between the objective of keeping Germany permanently weak and the desire to build her up as a necessary economic partner, it is hard to see how any compromise would have been possible.

Beyond this, there was a geo-political zero-sum game. Germany's central position in Europe and her huge economic potential - to say nothing of her

all-too-well proven military capacity - made her an asset that neither side could afford to lose. For Stalin the restoration of a capitalist, Western-

oriented Germany would simply recreate the threat of the 1930s. After all, it was out of the bowels of just such a society that militaristic fascism had

emerged, and it might well do so again. He could trust only a Germany

that he controlled, and that meant one where, as in Eastern Europe, power was effectively in the hands of the communist party. But for the western powers, communism was frighteningly strong in Western Europe already. Soviet control over Germany would effectively mean that Stalin would dominate the entire continent without the Soviet armed forces having to move a single man or a single tank. As for an independent, `neutral' Germany of the kind after which German social-democrats hankered for a full decade - that aspiration for `disengagement in Europe' over which so much ink was spilled in the 1950s - that would be a recipe either for

continuing covert intervention by both sides which might well lead to a re- run, on a far larger and more dangerous scale of the Spanish Civil War; or an opportunity for Germany to re-establish herself as a great power by

playing off each side against the other. It was a dilemma of which European statesmen in 1945 were well aware, but they had no idea how to solve it.

It was ultimately far simpler to leave matters as they were, and I suspect that most people in the Foreign Office knew it, even if they did not say so or write it down. There was no enthusiasm in either Western or Eastern Europe for the recreation of a United Germany, to put it very mildly indeed. There was certainly no will whatever for an armed confrontation with the Soviet Union in order to create one. For both Stalin and the West, the continued division of Germany was so obviously the best

practicable solution to the problem, that subsequent generations may well wonder why it could not have been agreed with very much less fuss, let

alone armed confrontation. Indeed it might well have been agreed, had it

8

not been for the anomalous situation in Berlin, and the brinkmanship

adopted by Stalin to compel the Western allies to abandon their rights in the city. That event, more than any other, was responsible for transforming the Soviet Union, in the eyes of the West, from a difficult but necessary partner into a potential enemy, and the Germans from former enemies into

potential and necessary allies. It also did more than anything else to transform the United States from a sympathetic and generous, though still somewhat detached, former ally into a partner whose zeal for confrontation was to prove almost an embarrassment even to those who had most urgently solicited it.

Even if, as revisionist historians claim, Soviet intransigence should be interpreted as a purely defensive mechanism against the invasive forces of American capitalism, and even if the West had been more sympathetic to Soviet interests than they actually were - and it is hard to see, reading the documents of those sterile conferences of 1946, that we could have been any more sympathetic - it is now difficult to visualise how there could have been

any different outcome other than the division of Germany and with it the division of Europe; or one that could have provided a more stable basis for

peace.

Let us remember what the two world wars had been fought about - or at least, what this country and our European neighbours had gone to war about. In both cases we went to war to contain the power of Germany, as we had fought in previous generations to contain the power of France. Certainly in the First World War there was also much talk about defending

the rights of small nations, and indeed we did our best to establish them at the end of it. In the second we spoke about the destruction of Fascism and the restoration of democracy, and, again, we did our best after the war to live up to our promises. But ultimately in both wars Britain fought, and the British people were mobilised to fight, for the destruction of German power. The rights of small nations could not have been established after the First,

and democracy could not have been restored after the Second, until that had been achieved. There was much concern among intellectual elites in both wars, not least in the Foreign Office itself, about Britain's war aims, though it must be admitted that much of it arose from a desire to enlist the support of the United States. But the mass of the people in his country in both wars were fighting simply to beat the Germans, and that was war-aim enough. Churchill struck exactly the right note when he informed the House of Commons, when he addressed it for the first time as Prime Minister, that his administration had only one war-aim - Victory.

For the destruction of German power was the necessary basis for any peace in Europe - at least any peace that would be in the least compatible with British traditions, sentiments, ideals and interests. A new, sardonic generation of historians is suggesting that we would have been far wiser to have accepted in 1940 a Pax Germanzca that would have relinquished control

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of the Continent to the Third Reich in return for being allowed to keep our Empire. It is a scenario that I see little point in exploring except to wonder for how long, if Germany had controlled the Continent, we would have been allowed to keep our Empire - or indeed have been left effectively to govern ourselves at all. If Germany had been governed by a bourgeois democratic regime that shared our values, such as that which rules it today, it is conceivable that we might have yielded parity, indeed primacy to it as equably as we did to the United States; but this was not the case even in the First World War, let alone the Second. Even in the First World War the dominant elements in the German government were not interested in a `peaceful settlement' in any sense in which we understood it: for many of them war and conquest was an end in itself. In Hitler this philosophy was overt, and only blind wishful thinking prevented us from seeing this from the very beginning. And Hitler would not have achieved the success that he did had he not reflected a mood and a philosophy in German society as a whole to an extent that it has long been rather unfashionable for us to admit.

So one necessary element in the fifty-year peace that we have enjoyed has been the destruction of German power; much as the long peace that succeeded the Napoleonic wars rested at least in part on the destruction of French power. Those who now fear that a reunited Germany will once more threaten Europe are making much the same mistake as those who believed that Napoleon III of France would prove a reincarnation of his formidable uncle: even if he had the will to do so, French society would no longer provide the armies and the ideology to attempt a reconquest of Europe, and German society is even less likely to do so today.

Secondly, the destruction of German power made possible the solution of the problem that had been the immediate occasion of the Second World War; that of Germany's eastern borders. Even if a democratic regime had

survived in Germany between the wars, and even if one had been

effectively recreated after 1945, the stubborn dilemma would have

remained, how to reconcile the claims of the Germans to territories which they had learned to regard as their historic heartlands with the ethnic distribution of populations in those regions and the need for Poland to have

access to the sea. The problem of the Germans in the Sudetenland was also one that would not go. away. These problems were settled - perhaps finally - by the application by the Soviet Union, with the tacit approval of the Western allies, of Bismarckian blood and iron. Poles were evicted from the regions of the Ukraine, Ruthenia and Belorussia that they had occupied after 1921, while Germans were evicted, not only from the Sudetenland and the regions of West Prussia and Silesia conquered for them by Frederick the Great and his successors, but from the purely German lands of East Prussia. It was certainly realpolilik at its most outrageous. It would not have worked had not the Soviet Union possessed the power and the will not only to enforce such a solution, but to maintain

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it over two generations until the wounds inflicted by this brutal surgery had healed. The presence of millions of these `expellees' with votes in a democratic West Germany made it impossible for any West-German

government to accept this settlement for a full generation, and the existence of this irredentism was a very significant factor in making Soviet domination more acceptable to both Poles and Czechs. It was only twenty- five years later that a German government came to power that was able, with sufficient public support, to move towards acceptance of this settlement and sign treaties effectively recognising the status quo.

So the peace rested upon the destruction of German power and the settlement of the issue about which she was most likely to exercise that power. That in its turn depended on the continuing Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. It is unpleasant to have to recognise it, but that occupation, with all the appalling injustices and oppression it involved, was none the less a major factor in preserving post-war stability. If the West had successfully rolled back Soviet power, as we considered so desirable in the 1950s, it would only have uncovered all these traditional problems; the extension of German power again to the Baltic, the revival of the historic antagonisms of Poles against Germans, Germans against Czechs. That, I think, was well recognised within this building, and perhaps it made British policy more acquiescent in the status quo than advocates of democratic values and human rights would have wished. Neville Chamberlain has been understandably criticised for his tactless reference, during the Munich crisis, to quarrels between `far away people of whom we know nothing'. There was, and remains, resentment that we should have fought allegedly to preserve the independence of Poland against Germany only to acquiesce in her subordination by an equally evil regime. But the sad fact was that after 1945 there was no desire whatever in this country to go to war to redress injustices in Eastern Europe even if there had been the capacity; and the British government knew this very well.

Can it be said therefore that, in spite of appearances, Soviet power was really a factor of stability in post-war Europe and that we should now recognise this? The answer must be, at best, only up to a point. The jury is

still out, but a good case can be made that Stalin was quite prepared to acquiesce in the division of Europe and would have lived quite happily with this solution. The trouble arose perhaps less from Soviet strength than from West-European weakness. Unless the United States could be persuaded to become part of the European balance, the ugly geo-political fact of Soviet

power was bound to evoke constant alarm and apprehension among the weakened and divided nations of Western Europe, and would have done so even if it had been in the hands of a far more friendly and co-operative regime. As it was, the regime was neither friendly nor co-operative. It was the patron of powerful communist parties in the West that were instantly

responsive to Soviet political directions, and who profited immensely from

the post-war political confusion and economic weakness in their countries.

It was in Stalin's interests to keep Western Europe weak and divided, and he had the capacity to do so. It rapidly became clear that the nations of Western Europe could protect their interests only by an unprecedented degree of mutual co-operation, economic, and military; and that such co- operation would be insufficient, indeed impossible, without the committed support of the United States. With their instant acceptance of the offer of Marshall Aid, and the patient ground-work that went into the creation of NATO, the British statesmen and diplomats really earned their keep in creating the foundations for a stable peace.

With the establishment of NATO, even though no formal settlement had been reached, a balance of power was established that provided both sides with a framework for the peaceful development of their own societies. When the balance was threatened, it was to be in consequence not of Western but of Soviet fears. The presence of Allied forces and a democratic regime in West Berlin was a constantly destabilising factor for

the Soviet control of East Germany until it was sealed off with the building

of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Fears for the solidity of the Warsaw Pact led to the bloody Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the crushing of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but neither event provoked the West to intervene. With nuclear weapons now in the armouries of both sides, the stakes were too high: the balance of power had become a balance of terror. In any event, the destinies of the former great powers of Europe had now been to a large extent taken out of their own hands. They were now protectorates of the United States or satellites of the Soviet Union, and their fate depended on decisions taken in Washington and Moscow. The task of Western diplomats was now not so much to handle a hostile and suspicious Soviet Union as to cement good relations among themselves and to influence the policies of their friendly Superpower -a Superpower for whom Europe, however important, was only one region to be considered in a global confrontation.

The long peace was thus bought at a price, and one that some critics have

thought excessive. Some on the one hand have lamented the militarisation of our societies, the development of a `cold war mentality', and above all the risk of nuclear war that we had to accept in consequence; believing that all this endangered rather than stabilised peace. Others, at a different

end of the political spectrum, have complained of our cold-blooded abandonment of Eastern Europe to a regime little better than that from

which we had tried to rescue it. Both groups had good cases. But the policies advocated by such critics, however well-intentioned, carried with them the risk of destabilising the structure on which the entire post-war system had been erected - the one by weakening the West's capacity and will to defend itself, the other by provoking a violent reaction from an adversary whose minimal good-will was a condition of maintaining any kind of effective intercourse at all. Between these unacceptable alternatives our leaders have had to navigate, without really having any objective other than

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to avoid them and to keep the ship afloat. When suddenly the mists lifted and there appeared in sight a destination in whose very existence they had hardly dared to hope, they were as surprised as anyone else. None the less they knew exactly what to do.

If there is a parallel with the events of 1814-15, it is to be sought, not in 1945-46, but in 1989-90, when the statesmen of East and West at last came together to make a settlement on a basis of genuine understanding and justice: restoring a united but chastened Germany to the community of powers, defining the now accepted frontiers of Eastern Europe, and including a now co-operative Russia as a guarantor of the new settlement. In the entire annals of diplomatic history it is hard to find so signal an example of rapid and sensible settlement of disputes that had torn the continent apart for the best part of a century. But could so rapid and just a settlement have been achieved if the ground had not been prepared by so long, and so unjust, a peace?

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Sir Michael Howard

Formerly Professor of War Studies at King's College, London and successively Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Appointed Robert A Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale. President and co-founder of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Publications include: The Franco-Prussian War (1961); The Theory and Practice of War (1965); The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (1967); Studies in War and Peace (1970); Grand Strategy - vol. IV in UK History of the Second World War (1971); The Continental Commitment (1972); War in European History (1976); War and the Liberal Conscience (1978); The Causes of War (1983); ClausewitZ (1983); Strategic Deception in World War H (1990) and The Lessons of History (1991).

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i nis collection of documents from the archives of the foreign and Commonwealth Office is published by authorisation of Her Majesty's Government. The Editors have been accorded the customary freedom in the selection and arrangement of documents.

Published SERIES 1 (1945-1950)

Volume I The Conference at Potsdam, July----August 1945

Volume II Conferences and Conversations 1945: London, Washington and Moscow

Volume III Britain and America: Negotiation of the United States Loan, August-December 1945

Volume IV Britain and America: Atomic Energy, Bases and Food, December 1945 July 1946

Volume V Germany and Western Europe, August- December 1945

Volume VI Eastern Europe, August 1945-April 1946

Volume VII The United Nations: Iran, Cold War and World Organisation, January 1946-January 1947

SERIES II (1950-1955) Published Volume I The Schuman Plan, the Council of Europe and

Western European Integration, May 1950- December 1952

Volume II The London Conferences, January-June 1950

Volume III German Rearmament, September-December 1950

Volume IV Korea, June 1950-April 1951

In preparation Volume V Germany and European Security, 1952--1954

Volume VI The Middle East, 1951-1953

Free lists of Titles (state subject/s) are available from Her Majesty's Stationery Office, HMSO Books, 51 Nine Elms Lane, London SW8 5DR.

cNv. W

Drplomaey and Diplomatists in the 20th Century

No. 9

DBPO: Publishing Policy and Practice

No. 10 United Kingdom, United Nations and divided world, 1946

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

ISBN 0 903359 61 8